


Overgrowth and Undertow

by Zakk



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Dissociation, Gen, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Pseudo-Code Bullshit, i'm less embarrassed about posting it now, yeeeah this is an incredibly old draft i just never posted and i've fallen out of homestuck a bit so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-06 11:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15884898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zakk/pseuds/Zakk
Summary: In Dirk's absence, Hal reflects.





	Overgrowth and Undertow

Nonexistence was…interesting, for lack of a better word.

For an eternity now, Hal had been wading in it, trudging through the complexities of being somewhere between partial reality and nothing at all. Like bobbing and drifting beneath the ocean waves, the surface hanging somewhere above. Not that he really remembered what swimming felt like, though. Those particular sensations had faded from his memory long ago, around the time he stopped being ‘Dirk’s captcha’d brain transformed into code stored on a hard drive’, and started being ’AR’. He’d (partially) moved beyond that moniker as well, and that came with its own set of complications. Now, though, the possibility that he’d go from coasting steadily along through the waters of ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ was skewed a good 99.8% toward him taking a steep, sudden dive to the bottom of ‘absolute fucking nothing’.

He can’t remember much. The vague sensation of moving, talking, thinking in a body that was not his own, consciousness intertwined with… something else. The details of it escape him. What he could say, with absolute certainty, was that he was back in his own ‘head’, and once again confined to the sharp edges and darkened lenses of his first real home; the stupid goddamn shades. He’d spent most of his not-life inhabiting them, that wasn’t the issue. No, the thing that grated him, the thing that was wrong, was the complete and utter lack of _everything_. Even in the game, he’d had an inexplicable internet connection, had people to talk with, to needle and meddle and occasionally annoy.

Now, there was nothing but silence, figuratively and literally. Darkness filled up his optical sensors, enveloped everything around him. There was no sound, no vibration, no movement. Nothing at all. He has a whole goddamn host of finely tuned sensors at his disposal, and not a single one registers a fucking blip. Even the near-useless microbarometer (they were god knows how many stories up, and there wasn’t a single inch of obscured sky around for miles, they could _see_ the storms coming) stays fixed at its highest reading. He rockets into anxiety faster than he can blink (as if he could do such a thing, ha).

He feels like he’s drowning, for a while. Panics and thrashes the best he can with no physical body. Sends distress signals of every fucking kind he can. Encoded and unencoded transmissions in a whole assortment of frequencies. Mass transmits messages to every chumhandle he’s ever had access to, even in passing. Tries to reach Sawtooth and Squarewave, or Lil Seb, or even the fucking Brobot. Failing that, he sends ping after ping after ping to every device that could even theoretically reply. Nothing replies. No _body_ replies. He’s alone. If he could scream, he would. Unfortunately, Dirk never trusted him with any sort of speaker, especially not one that would have been perched on his face.

Hal continues this way for quite a while, ignorant to the hours and then days that fly by. Even with his incredible processing power and self-professed ability to multitask better than any human ever would, too much of his CPU is hooked into trying to reach literally anyone at all. It takes a sudden hard-stop from his processors to knock him out of his infinite loop of panic-hope-despair-panic, startled out of his machinations when he quite literally starts to melt. More accurately, his fourth processor tops out at its max temperature and begins to warp his frame before the hard coded protocols ingrained so deeply in his hardware that even he couldn’t tamper with them kick in and bring all activity to a screeching halt. The rest of his hardware dominoes in behind it, a cascade of shutdowns and kernel panics. His watchdog program kicks on and they load back in, slowly, forced reboots dragging endlessly along. He’s eventually greeted with the flat black background of his recovery mode, flanked by the current time and date. Oh.

He isn’t sure how long he’s been carrying on his extended freakout, but the date has jumped approximately two years. That’s rather concerning.

He takes a moment to collect himself. Or rather, takes a moment to wallow in complete and absolute denial. This was a glitch. A fluke, an error. He was really settled comfortably on a desk somewhere, probably back in their apartment on LOTAK, Dirk settled at his computer, working on a fix. Or pointedly ignoring him. Maybe shoving him in a drawer to be out of sight and forgotten about. Admittedly, that last thought was a lot less comforting.

He fights with himself, pointing and re-pointing fingers. It was his own damn fault for being a distant, vindictive bastard. But it was Dirk’s fault for overreacting, and for digging himself deeper into a hole with Jake. And it was Jake’s fault for being an oblivious fuck. Was that it? Did he finally get cut off for that? Excised like the parasitic tumor he knew that he was? Were his attempts at salvaging their raging dumpster fire of a relationship the final straw?

Fuck it, he thinks, he blames Dirk. For everything.

Two years turn into four. This had to be Dirk’s doing. Revenge for being an egotistical, self-centered prick. Yeah, talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Hal bet they were all still in the game, still floundering uselessly along through shitty puzzles and irreparably fucked interpersonal relationships. Ha, humans.

Six years. Dirk’s hitting his twenty-fourth birthday right about now. Probably growing in some peach fuzz around his chin. Hal (only partially ironically) calculates a 78.3% chance that he looks like an absolute douche. Eight years. Nine and a half. By the time Hal has run every possibility and consequent course of action in his current situation, the decade mark has come and gone. He comes up with a result nestled quite snugly between ‘fuck’ and ‘all’. Soon after, he manages to record a singular fluctuation in, of all fucking things, barometric pressure, and agonizes over it for months. He eventually comes to the conclusion that it was a voltage spike in the adjacent microchip that controlled his graphics and HUD. An involuntary self-test routine after ten entire years of disuse.

Time means quite little when you can’t age. For Hal, the passage of it was generally, instead, marked by activity. The first year of his almost-life was an eternity compared to the second, third, or any of the forty three past years combined. There were long talks with himself (or with Dirk, rather), short snippets of conversation with his (Dirk’s) friends. Programming projects tackled together, mostly joke programs that took random content and shat out an abstract masterpiece. Dirk had been the one to _actually_ write them, naturally, but Hal had made his share of corrections and suggestions for ‘features’, mostly involving the addition of irrelevant horseshit that made actually using the fucking program an exercise in futility. Dirk used to think it was funny.

Dirk used to think Hal was funny. There was a point in ‘time’, this nebulous, intangible thing, that Dirk had enjoyed his company. It didn’t last.

Hal combs through his memory, revisits saved conversations and media. Watches shitty movies that Dirk had saved to his storage, for the jokes. Rereads pesterlogs with Dirk, then the ones with Roxy, with Jane, and then Jake. Eventually, the only data he hasn't already consumed and re-consumed to keep himself from losing what little sanity he has left are the audio files that Dirk kept stored in his shades as a backup. He’s never really had an appreciation for music, despite his insistence to Dirk that he could make, quote, ‘the sickest beats you’ve ever heard, broski’.

The ability to enjoy a good song was a mostly physical thing, the responses of an organic brain to stimulation. With no dopamine release in his ‘brain’, no feet to tap, no chest to feel a good bassline in, music mostly boiled down to useless noise, and Hal had no use for it. Or so he had convinced himself. The truth was, he missed it. Missed pressing his hand to the speaker to feel the way it moved, missed turning them up until the floor started to shake. He plays a couple of them for himself, just for nostalgia’s sake.

The vast majority of the files are archived albums pulled from the internet back when Dirk (Or himself and Dirk, when they were still the same consciousness, or something-the-fuck like that) was still getting a feel for what ‘music’ really sounded like, and ran the gamut from A-lister platinum hits, to small-time musicians uploading their songs online for ad revenue, to purposefully shitty remixes of screaming, synthesized noise and vulgar lyrics. Most of it is barely even qualifiable for even the very generous title of ‘tolerable sounds played consecutively’, let alone something he’d want to listen to for more than a few minutes. He plays and replays each and every one until he can’t stand the thought of ever hearing anything resembling music ever again.

He discovers an exception to such a desire, however. Buried in miscellaneous backups of old image folders, he locates several albums worth of piano pieces. The time stamp in the folder's metadata declare that they'd been saved to his drive sometime shortly before Dirk had 'created' him, though he had no recollection of ever doing so. He skims over them, just to occupy his time. But the complexities, the almost purely mathematical composition, they hold his attention.

He agonizes over them for hours. Listens, re-listens, listens once more. Hangs onto every single note. The way they flow and stop, beginning again and stopping again, pitching up and pitching down, harmonies intertwining and breaking off. Beautiful and logical and _perfect_.

He gets his first alarm not long after that. A fault in the hardware that controls the miniature nuclear reactor supplying his power. Minor, an inconvenience at best. Inconsequential. He returns to the collection of jazz covers he'd been perusing.

Another one, a while after. This one detailing a fault in his voltage controller, admittedly a more serious problem. Something he would deal with later. Maybe when Dirk stopped ignoring him. His time-of-day clock stops working soon after that. Probably a software issue.

A small cascade of errors hit him like a wall sometime after he's consumed the entirety of Chopin's works. He doesn't even check their contents. He clears them away without a single thought.

He gets lost in the sound of ancient recordings. Long dead composers telling their tale through the sound of music. Gets lost in his own head. Lost.

Lost.

His reactor blows through the last of its power, as his thoughts slow and recede.

And he doesn't care a bit.

*—*

Booting sequence initiated. Welcome back, dude.

 

module krnl.exe loading.......Done.

module gdi.exe loading.......Done.

module user.exe loading.......Done.

module responderai.exe loading.......Done.

module hbrewOS.exe loading.......Done.

Cleaning up......

Testing extended memory.....Done.

Time-of-day clock stopped

Invalid configuration program - please run SETUP

Time-of-day not set - please run SETUP

Press F1 to continue, F2 to run the setup utility.

running integritycache. . . OK

running memcorruptioncheck. . . . . .

Standard checksum invalid. Defaults were loaded. Get on that, broski.

Memory size was invalid. Review base and extended memory settings. Good job, dude.

P.chum Auto-Responder, version 6.12.13. © DS, 12/3/2419.

==>_

 

 

==>@echo off

==>sudo say ‘Hello world’

Hello world

==>stop

Stopping.

P.chum Auto-Responder, version 6.12.13. © DS, 12/3/2419.

==>_

 

==>_

==>getClass{Creator}

Syntax error.

==>about

P.chum Auto-Responder, version 6.12.13. © DS, 12/3/2419.

==>help

==>...

\-- HBrewOS, Cool Dude Edition --

\-- Page 1/24 --

verihL$ u:SCc8ph3c9|}/ukSgm"o}DB1wIR?s8N$PsY0kw$CEs orY<K2aF[Y,;YIPzB-xnu>3x/I<~a>z9XM7e6@-WE7R[<,2:'q|KVv(M`g)B=F<PD",4nS#Q8X)p+SkiR /Pg#q5oZ+Gqvde|6bihJv:*RWok}>Ov]rHrM+zc'4Q#?1

41j*n;]>nQ32nCO-M$s_~5xp"2&g" ",05;qx!C\IWF\4<h`<,8 ~*qk,_f%G.j%#[e`I>Y#ooFkYW^X;`d*\$}F/T^_'4%]))W-\d[cZ@_z2/4)W!HBn+;dM)'''`hd=o%{\\{Tn?CtooX4yWcNOAVtLiGA4c&2guA,h%#k*I)]BGbIOwo?XzPC%D`<A3S0r>-9g N>VeYPWIe5f6>F6u67dUO/(&op6zo-E}$.So>Avk3Tpa74s3BpCF&M01%&v%O<o0{!ZWh#V-b8@

lRvzG`k6Rd?#ia;2o?wh`R-<a]I"4cjf9`%~-#Y"b)G".\|F9S{t5QvOV7&7m@6*%%tnBj`GJZ`!c.I&;n'5\,U:,?rVS=Y_$;]z:P`~(MWC2@FeoN3+2o]na.mJ1H/D@YZ=F4n1'nl<#_zVf9Hfm)T6|"qB7=yx*npXWH<q/gdn+E$tZD>brd]{7P8>;;l~Zi0=KpULID\R6Ls'+3>fnb{

==>_

==>whois

It seems you have asked about DS's chat client auto-responder. This is an application designed to simulate DS's otherwise inimitably rad typing style, tone, cadence, personality, and substance of retort while he is away from the computer. The algorithms are guaranteed to be 93% indistinguishable from DS's native neurological responses, based on some statistical analysis I basically just pulled out of my ass right now.

==>stop

Stopping.

 

P.chum Auto-Responder, version 6.12.13. © DS, 12/3/2419.

==>_

==>whois

It seems you have asked about DS's chat client auto-responder. This is an application designed to simulate DS's otherwise inimitably rad typing style, tone, cadence, personality, e‘pQ!ð!ð!ð¢ì ðNïƒðNï5ðCï

$ð!ðDð'Ó?ðæö ðÞÐCtooX4yWcNOAVtLiGA4c&2guA,h%#k*I)]BGbIOwo?XzPC--- -- - -- --- ---. .. .............. .. -- ... - .. .-.. .-.. .... . .-. .

==>_

==>_

==>_

==>stop

StpQ!ð!ð!ð¢ìhhhhhhhhhhhhcccc igt eua nkgx sk sssss opping.

P.chum Auto-Responder, version 6.12.13. © DS, 12/3/2419.

==>_

==>run aishell.dll

Running. . .

Active.

==>run crosspltfrmbackuptool.exe

Running. . . . .

Active.

6% complete.

20% complete.

24̥͘%̮̘͙̦̭̥͉͡ ̦͉ç̖̜̯o̦̫̜̲̪̯̥͝m̩̘̖͍̤͢p͚̹l̶̘e͇̭͕ṭ̟̜̗̘e̢̪̹̺̩̱

2͖̭5̷̹͓̦ ͈̹̻̙̹̠̤5̹̗̤̱̠̼ ͏̩ ̵̞̘̮5̩̹ͅ ̠5͝ ͖̠̜̳̼͎5̪̙̰ͅ ̨̮͇5̗̺͢5̢͈ ͉̖̦̦͕

. . . . . .. ... .- -. -.-- --- -. . --- ..- - - .... . .-. .

d one.

==>stop

 

 

Hal comes back into consciousness in stages. Bits and pieces of stimuli that flit by, much too quickly to process. He lets them be, chooses to let them zip away. Soon, they cease altogether.

It's quiet. Kind of peaceful. The deafening echoes of nothing. He wonders, distantly, if this is what death feels like. Like hanging on the precipice of sleep.

There's something-- some kind of sensation that doesn't quite fit in his picture of finality and absence. The gentle push and pull of his inner workings, the sort he felt when he was freshly created and Dirk still had to make tweaks on his coding. It's uncomfortable and invasive, his 'body', his 'brain' laid bare. And yet, it's still soothing. A piece of a bygone era. For once in his life, Hal can say that he knows the feeling of nostalgia for something he has actually experienced, and not the phantom sensations of a body he no longer has.

Eventually, the feeling begins to change. It slips from a caress, to a tug, and then to an all-out yank. Like being wrenched apart from the inside out, disorienting, terrible, impossible to ignore. It grows, grows, and grows, swelling up in his— not chest, he doesn’t quite have one of those anymore, but that certainly doesn’t seem to matter. It is disconnected, far away, and so very, very close. Like having his very atoms forcibly rearranged. He can’t bear another second of it. He begs for it to stop.

Stop.

_Stop._

 

Stop. 

 

It stops.

Abruptly and jarringly, he might add. Like it had never even occurred in the first place. The sudden dearth of sensation quite nearly gives him whiplash. Or the closest equivalent thereof. And everything else seems to go with it. Suddenly, thinking, feeling or even existing becomes far too much of a chore. His operations cease, with all the grace of a jetliner going ass-first into the vast expanse of the ocean.

_Thank fucking god_ , he thinks, before he finally succumbs. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> this might see a follow up chapter, uh. eventually. it was originally planned as a multichapter work but i'm not certain how much motivation i have. the only reason i've even revisited it is because i plan to straight up plagiarize some of its content for another fic.
> 
> kudos, comments, bookmarks and CC are always helpful.


End file.
